The Brazen Head (38 page)

Lilith retreated till she was in the space between the two big doors; then seizing them both with outstretched arms, she tried to shut herself inside. But she was too late; and it was together, and with a combined effort, that they finally got the great doors shut and barred, leaving only their dark woodwork in the centre of that vast structure of stone as the target for all that crowd of onlookers.

Only one of the numerous people, whom the demonic power in Peter of Maricourt’s lodestone had succeeded in gathering before those closed gates, gave any thought at that moment to what was happening behind those closed doors, and that one was Roger Bacon.

“It is like what went on,” he told himself, “between the Devil and the first wife of Adam; the very same devil who a little later was present at the creation of Eve. If I weren’t so tired I’d work out a clear map of these zodiacal revolutions in Time and Space.”

It was indeed only natural that our Friar felt “tired” as he had not been out of his prison-chamber for more than a year. But he felt in good spirits and extremely interested in all he saw. So he seated himself on the mossy root of the oldest oak-tree in sight, a tree that might well have been an offshoot of the yet older one on which the bird rested who first brought to Britain the news of the death of Jesus; and from this secure position, as he contemplated the crowd and watched his own creation, the Brazen Head, balanced on the shoulder of Peleg and supported by what Homer would have called the “leukolenian” arm of the stately Ghosta, he allowed his mind to drift in a mood of fascinated wonder over the long eddies and aberrations of mankind’s historic pilgrimage down the ages, pondering upon its pathetic, humorous, and tragical struggles with itself, with Nature, and with the innumerable false prophets and false gods who from the beginning have led us all astray.

But as he rested under that oak, half-awake and half-asleep and unusually happy, he suddenly became aware, by no very
unnatural thought-transference, of the laboured approach to his side of none other than Lay-Brother Tuck from the Priory. The most hostile historian could have caught nothing but friendly amusement in the tone wherein this anticipator of all mankind’s wildest inventions replied to this interruption when he heard himself greeted by Brother Tuck.

“Sit down, Brother,” was all the Friar said. “So you’ve come for me, have you? Well, well! We shan’t have any trouble except in our own legs as we go back. O no! I haven’t the faintest intention of leaving my room in the Priory, my ‘Prison’ some call it, but you and I know better! We know how little I regard it as anything like that! What did I become a Friar for? Wasn’t it for a quiet study to work in? You know
that
, Tuck old friend, as well as I do! Nobody but you, Tuck old rogue—Here! Sit you down here! You must be fairly done in after all that distance!—nobody but you knows what racy stories go round in our rollicking Bumset!

“Yes, and nobody but I know what a patient listener you are, my dear, to my irreverent gossip about the so-called ‘makers of history’, whose crazy ideas I have to describe to the Holy Father to prove I’m not idling away my time.

“Just look at all these people, Tuck! Just look at them! Do you know what got them here? I can’t tell you exactly; but I can tell you this much. It has to do with a discovery in
magnetism
by this acquaintance of mine—I hesitate to call him a friend, as, to confess the truth, I’m rather scared of him and a bit nervous—I always
have
been since I first encountered the man
somewhere
abroad—I don’t think it was in Paris—a bit nervous—you know how cowardly I am, Tuck old friend!—that he might start his magnetic experiments on me!

“But let him go. And by God, he has gone! He’s behind those barred gates now, practising on young Mistress Lilith, who’s just watched her parents murder each other, and seen all their people and all their serfs bolt after a speech by Dod Pole! Yes, that Lilith-girl watched her father and mother fight to the death; and then saw all her people, both bond and free, strip off their clothes and rush away into the woods and marshes!

“Old Dod Pole made one of those orations of his that
everyone’s
been telling me about. And do you know, Tuck my
friend, the old boy struck some note in my midriff that brought back to my mind a scene at Montacute when—but what on earth is that Dominican from Cologne, and a demi-semi bishop he is, too, preaching about now up there? Can you catch what he’s saying?”

It was clear enough that Brother Tuck
had
caught very distinctly one point anyway in the Dominican’s speech: “Well! I never thought I’d live to hear——” he now cried out.

Roger Bacon turned to him with the most lively interest. “Hear what? For God’s sake, old friend, stop chuckling like an enamoured goblin and tell me what the fellow’s saying! You’ve had lots of foreigners in your kitchen and ought to know their accent by now! My long walk to this confounded place and this wild wind and the whistling of those King’s Men seem to have made me stone deaf.”

Lay-Brother Tuck rose on his toes, for the angel who
presided
at his birth had decreed that, if he was to be the merriest of the sons of his mother, he must consent to be the shortest. He also seized a branch of the oak above the Friar’s head and hoisted himself up a little, placing a screen of leaves between Roger Bacon and the astonishing spectacle before him.

But the Friar had trained himself too long to accept such crampings of vision to fall into a rage because he now couldn’t see this black-robed figure at the gate of Lost Towers any better than he could hear him.

“He’s got a thing on his head,” announced Brother Tuck, “more like a turban than a mitre.”

“Never mind what he’s got on his head, Tuck. Tell me, for Jesus’s sake, what the fellow’s saying.”

“He’s offering to marry anybody who wants to be married.”

“Nonsense, Tuck! Nonsense! No priest of our time, even if he were Archbishop of Ireland, would stand on a hill before the gates of Hell and offer marriage to the world!”

“But he is, he is! I tell you, Friar, he is! He’s saying that the great evil of our time is that people don’t marry early enough!”

“Not early enough, Tuck! God in Heaven! Haven’t I been trying all my life to stop this curst habit of marrying little girls of twelve to old men of sixty? Not early enough! What will
these doctors of theology want to do next? Marry babies to each other? Marry foetuses in separate wombs, on the chance that they turn out of opposite sexes?

“The truth must be that we monks and nuns and friars are finding our celibate life so indescribably tedious that we want to increase the number of these kicking, scratching, biting, beating, strangling couples, in order that we can at least feel thankful we’re free from the claws of a mate! But shall we never see, O my turtle-dove of Tucks, that it’s our mania for marriage itself that’s spoiling our world? Nature can provide us with loyal and faithful mates without our having formally to create such monstrosities of scratching and clawing.”

Friar Roger continued for several minutes this diatribe against marriage; but Lay-Brother Tuck was by this time far too fascinated by what was going on to pay his metaphysical friend any further attention.

Roger Bacon’s own mind, however, was itself soon
wandering
from the problem of marriage. It was of astrology he was thinking now as he stared heavenward above the left buttock of Brother Tuck and through an impenetrable mass of
oak-leaves
. Thus it was not the mid-day sunshine beating down on the black robes and elaborate head-dress of the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas that the inventor of the Brazen Head was now beholding, but the black abysses of the star-sprinkled midnight sky wherein he saw, although many of them would in reality when midnight came have been totally invisible, all the stars that were important as signs of the zodiac.

But something in the whole atmosphere of this particular spot on the earth’s surface at this particular moment soon forced our great scientist’s mind back upon the religious creed which from childhood he had been taught to take for granted.

He shut his eyes to both the blue sun-bright sky of reality and the black starlit sky of his imagination and began
murmuring
to himself:

“Dicit ut audiat vocem Domini et vocem angelorum et videat angelos transfiguratos
—He says that he heard the voice of the Lord and the voice of angels and that he saw transfigured angels.

“Christo vero habuit divinum testimonium, quod testimonium Deus
Pater fecit ei
—Christ truly had a divine testimony, namely the testimony which God the Father himself made on his behalf.

“Hic est Filius Meus dilectus in quo mihti complacuit
. This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”

Had some observant passer-by, endowed, let us suppose, with the power of reading a person’s thoughts, caught the drift of the Friar’s murmured words, he might well have been astonished that so great a scientist, whose inventions were beginning to be the wonder of the whole intellectual world, should be muttering at a crisis like this sentences that were involved in the very foundation of the Christian faith. The truth was that Roger Bacon had taken Aristotle for granted with one side of his nature, and the New Testament equally for granted with the other side of his nature, and had never, as Albertus of Cologne did, brought them into logical
opposition
to each other and into logical relation with each other.

But, after all, Friar Roger’s ways are the ways of Nature herself in regard to these abysmal matters. Out of the confusion which she seems to prefer to any orderly workshop, Nature seems anxious to thicken out the drama she has inaugurated by creating ironic commentaries upon her own doings, whose choruses are not so much the expression of approval or
disapproval
as of humorous recognition, and produce the effect of a faint orchestral accompaniment, an accompaniment that reaches us from extremely far away and possibly from a sphere totally different from our own.

If Friar Bacon had not been so absorbed in his interior vision of the signs of the zodiac and of the relation between Mercurius and Virgo and in the agitating conclusion he had reached—for to him by far the most interesting aspect of astronomy was astrology—about the perilous influence of our earthly satellite, the Moon—“Luna significat
super-nigro
-manciam et mendacium—The moon is significant of higher black magic and trickery”—he would have doubtless had some striking commentary to make upon what was now going on in front of those closed gates of Lost Towers.

All that morning Albertus Magnus had been saying to
himself
: “Whatever it was that brought all these people here and brought me on the top of them all, I’d be worse than the
self-conscious fool I am if I didn’t take advantage of it in some way. That’s what’s the matter with me. I’m no good at
creating
situations. I just accept them and make the necessary plunges and darts and dives and gestures as seem called for.

“The one single act of my whole life”—so the great teacher’s thoughts ran on, even after he had begun acting his part for today—“that I did entirely on my own and under no influence from outside was when I gave up that bishopric: aye!” and Albertus indulged in a grotesque dramatic shudder and wrinkled up all his malleable features; “aye! aye! but it was an appalling experience, those two years of being a bishop! But what on earth am I going to do with this chance the Lord has thrown in my path?”

And then the inspiration came to him.

“Sex is the maddest force there is. Why then not consecrate this madness? All the way down the history of our race—not to speak of certain beasts and birds—males and females have gone through curious ceremonies to celebrate this union. When we Christianize marriage, it is to demonstrate our share in Christ’s own desperate and eternal act of faith that He was the Son of God. Sex is the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain in life; and the ceremonious consecration of the joining together of sex-mates has been the instinctive retort of all animal life to the insanity of sex from the beginning of the world.”

Thus did the thoughts of Albertus Magnus run on, even while he began the quaint performance into which his “
guardian
angel”, or, if you like, “his conscience”—although that word introduces just as many insoluble riddles—had now precipitated him.

“Come hither my son Tilton, sculptor and carver and builder of a shrine! Come hither my daughter Una, of the family of Pole, largest of all the families upon the said manor! If you Tilton take you Una to be your wedded wife, and if you Una take you Tilton to be your wedded husband, all the old deep rifts, between those who work on the land and those who own and fight for the land, will be healed!”

To the absolute amazement of Brother Tuck and of a good many others of those who were watching this queer scene, but not to the surprise of young John, who was now standing at
Sir Mort’s side and explaining to him more things than Sir Mort could or would or can be imagined ever wanting to understand, both Tilton and Una now appeared hand-in-hand before Albertus Magnus.

So accustomed was Albertus to this particular ceremony, every word of which he knew by heart, that it was not long before this pair’s union was consecrated, consecrated before men and before birds and beasts and angels and demons,
consecrated
as one flesh.

This had no sooner been done than bursting forth from the band of people who surrounded Sir Mort, and followed with obvious anxiety by both the Baron Boncor and his boy-knight Sir William, there emerged in a furious rush of frenzy like a shrieking Valkyrie the figure of Lady Ulanda, whose whole body—since to increase her speed, or perhaps deliberately to enhance the effect of her wrath, she kept tearing from her person one flimsy garment after another—was positively
contorted
with emotion.

It was purely against Friar Bacon that her anger was directed; for, by his cold refusal on that one fatal visit of hers to his room, to play the part of her dresser-up and devoted medico-magico, he had hurt that centre of a woman’s
life-illusion
, a blow to which goes deeper into her essential being than if you cut off one of her arms at the wrist or one of her feet at the ankle.